How to make steel go green – with songs!

This is something you don’t see every day: a substantial, carefully-researched book on how to reform our manufacturing industries, paired with an album of songs on the same theme.

Let’s start with the book. Sustainable Materials: With Both Eyes Open tackles a particularly thorny question: how can we cut our greenhouse gas emissions to a safe level, without shutting down essential industries? It focuses on steel and aluminium, which between them account for 28 per cent of all industrial emissions, although later chapters briefly consider cement, paper and plastics as well.

This is a follow-up book to David MacKay’s much-vaunted Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air. Both feature academics from the University of Cambridge carefully working out how we can transform an emissions-heavy sector of the economy.

The eight authors, led by Julian Allwood and Jonathan Cullen, first take a close look at how steel and aluminium are produced from their respective ores, asking “how much can the metals industry do to clean up its act?” The answer they come up with: “plenty, but nowhere near enough”.

So they take a second approach, asking whether we can redesign the things we make to use less metal, use them for longer, and recycle their components when they wear out. This also offer plenty of options. Reassuringly, when the two approaches are combined the total emissions cuts are substantial.

Some of the ideas they come up with are so simple, I wondered why no
one thought of them before. For instance, the average fridge lasts about
10 years, and gets thrown out when the compressor fails. This is a
small part, but it takes a lot of work to replace so it’s cheaper to buy
a new fridge. If fridges were redesigned so that the compressor was
easy to replace, they would last far longer. “You shouldn’t have to buy
two fridges in your lifetime,” they say.

It’s quite a technical book, so it may not have much popular appeal,
despite its nicely chatty style. But for policy-makers trying to cut
emissions, and anyone in manufacturing, it should be required reading.

And so to the album, a collaboration between Allwood and soprano Adey Grummet, which is much better than it has any right to be. Worthy music on eco-conscious themes can sound like Spinal Tap’s Listen to the Flower People, but With Both Eyes Open actually contains a couple of good tunes.

The strongest songs get away from the details of materials science and become universal. The opening track, You Gotta Start,
is an up-tempo number extolling the virtues of having a go, even when
you don’t know exactly what you need to do. It’s not just about
sustainability.

Similarly, the title track is a passionate call to arms, urging
people to move away from blind consumerism. The closing line - “the
stuff of life is life and not just stuff” - is better and more relevant
than anything Coldplay will write next year.

Given how specialist the subject matter is, I’m not sure how many
people the album will really appeal to. Of the 12 songs, I only expect
to keep the two I’ve highlighted on my MP3 player. Unfortunately, the
rest just restate ideas from the book in a slightly less clear way.

I worry that the album will give people, particularly policy-makers,
the impression that the book is somehow flaky and not worth paying
attention to. That would be a crying shame, because the book’s lessons
are clear, well-supported, and vital.